RE: installation convention (include & libs)

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>From lua-l@tecgraf.puc-rio.br Tue Nov 23 16:44:55 1999
>From: Paul Bleisch <PBleisch@digitalanvil.com>
>
>There is some documentation somewhere (lua manual, readme or
>something) that basically says "the lib source is in here",
>"the client source is in here", "the example source is in 
>here".  Because of this, I can open up my handy little project
>tool that is not "make" based and plop all of the .c files 
>in the libs source directory, hit build, and things work.
>
>If the system becomes reliant on make, this becomes more and
>more difficult to do.

I'd like to assure everyone that, in the whole spirit of Lua, we intend to
keep the installation process as simple as possible.
We provide simple Makefiles for systems that have make (not necessarily gmake!)
and simple instructions for systems that don't. And that's it.

GNU software is excellent and takes great pains to make sure that it builds as
automatically as possible -- they have excellent tools for this.
This makes building complex packages a breeze.
However, it does annoy me when I download a simple package and have to wait
a long time (even on a 400 MHz Pentium running Linux) until configure does
its thing and I can type "make" (which is over in a fraction of the time that
configure takes to run).

If Lua wasn't 100% ANSI C, we'd probably have to use configure or something.
As it stands, Lua is so simple to compile that nothing else is needed (not even
make).

(As an aside, I did write a cflow replacement for GNU that is not distributed
because they insisted that I used configure, even though it was 100% ANSI C.)
--lhf